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jeudi 2 avril 2020

OnePlus 8 series MEMC tech will work with YouTube, Netflix, VLC, and more

OnePlus recently announced that the company will be launching its next flagship lineup — the OnePlus 8 series — later this month on April 14th. While we’ve previously seen several leaks and rumors about the OnePlus 8 series, the company is now slowly divulging more information about the devices in the days leading up to the launch. The company’s CEO, Pete Lau, recently confirmed that the OnePlus 8 series will feature a high refresh rate 120Hz display, Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 865 SoC, LPDDR5 RAM, and UFS 3.0 storage. Now, in a string of posts on Chinese social media platform Weibo, Lau has released even more information about the display technology used in the OnePlus 8 series.

Up until now, we’ve already learned that the displays on the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro will feature a 2K resolution with a pixel density of 513ppi, peak brightness of 1300 nits, and 4096 levels of brightness adjustments. The company has also revealed that the panel will feature HDR support, and there will also be an ambient color temperature sensor to adjust the white balance under different lighting environments. In addition, Lau has now elaborated further on the MEMC technology on the OnePlus 8 series and has revealed that it will work with apps like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar, VLC, MX Player, and more.

OnePlus 8 MEMC supported apps

MEMC (Motion Estimation, Motion Compensation), which OnePlus first talked about earlier this year in January, is a frame insertion technique to convert low frame rate videos to a higher frame rate. On the OnePlus 8 series, this is hardware accelerated through an independent chip. As a result, the OnePlus 8 series will be able to convert 24/30fps videos playing in supported apps to 60/120fps for significantly smoother playback. A sample video of the MEMC tech in action shows exactly what you can expect while playing videos on the OnePlus 8 series. What’s most interesting is that the feature will work with offline video players like VLC and also with videos played using the OnePlus Gallery app. However, we currently aren’t sure if the feature will be available both on the regular OnePlus 8 and the OnePlus 8 Pro.

Additionally, OnePlus has now also revealed that the displays on the OnePlus 8 series have earned DisplayMate’s highest ever A+ display performance rating. As per DisplayMate’s analysis, the OnePlus 8 series display set or matched more than 10 smartphone display performance records in virtually all key categories for the best display on the market, including color accuracy, image contrast, display brightness, and screen reflection, with 4 categories marked “Visually Indistinguishable” from Perfect.

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Peloton launches live fitness class app for Android TV

If you weren’t familiar with Peloton before last Holiday season, the company’s infamous ad probably made you aware. Peloton is a fitness company that produces exercise equipment along with a network of live fitness classes. The idea is to bring the experience of a group fitness class to your home, something that’s very appealing in these times. Peloton announced today that they’re bringing their app to Android TV.

Previously, the Peloton app was available for Android phones and tablets along with Apple and Amazon Fire devices. Starting today, you can join your fitness classes on your Android TV. The company offers a wide variety of live and on-demand classes for activities such as yoga, running, meditation, and spinning (the most popular activity).

Peloton sells its own exercise bike and treadmill with built-in large screens, but the app is a way for people to take advantage of the classes with their own equipment. You can sign up now for a free 90-day trial and try out the classes for yourself. This offer is only good until April 30th. The subscription price is normally $12.99 per month for a single person or $39 per month for a group account. If you do sign up, keep in mind you can also access the service on your phone, tablet, and browser.

Peloton - at home fitness (Free+, Google Play) →


Source: Peloton | Via: Android Authority

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Realme 5/5s and Realme 1 get new updates with March 2020 security patches

Realme is growing rapidly and becoming increasingly popular for the great hardware it offers at highly competitive prices. After capturing a big share of price-sensitive markets in Asia, it is vying to replicate the same in Europe. But besides launching phones in quick succession, Realme is also committed to timely software updates. Throughout the month of March, the company updated the majority of its phones with the latest security updates. Now, it’s time for Realme 5/5s and Realme 1 which are now getting March 2020 security patches along with some improvements and bug fixes in the latest updates based on ColorOS 6.0.1.

Realme 5 and 5s

The Realme 5 and 5s are essentially the same phone. The only difference between the two is in terms of primary camera on the back. While the Realme 5 features a 12MP camera, the 5s is equipped with a 48MP camera rocking a Samsung ISOCELL Bright GM1 sensor. The two phones are getting fixes to some bugs along with the March 2020 Google security patches as part of the latest build number RMX1911EX_11_A.27.

Realme 5/5s XDA Forums

Realme 5/5s changelog:

  • Security
    • Android security patch: March, 2020
  • System
    • Fixed some known bugs, and improved system stability

Realme 1

Realme’s first device, the Realme 1 – originally launched under OPPO’s branding is also getting the latest security patches. Along with the latest security update, the Realme 1 also receives a fix for the bug which was preventing it from connecting to VoWiFi without the availability of 4G network with build version CPH1861EX_11_C.48.

OPPO Realme 1 XDA Forums

Realme 1 changelog:

  • Security
    • Android security patch: March, 2020
  • Network
    • Fixed the issue that VoWiFi unable to registered in 2G / 3G network

As per the community posts, the updates have begun rolling out to the three phones in a phased manner. You can expect the updates to reach your phones soon. We will update the article once the download links are updated on the company’s website.

As mentioned above, these updates are based on ColorOS 6.0.1 which is developed upon Android 9 Pie. The Realme UI update based on Android 10 is slated to arrive on Realme 5/5s in May 2020 while the Realme 1 will not be receiving the update.


Sources: Realme Community (1)(2)(3)

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[Working From Home] Here are Five of our Favorite Productivity Document Tools

2020 has more businesses trying to figure out how to have their employees work from home than ever before. People are having work meetings, video conferences, and working on documents from their home. When you separate yourself from your office, you’ll find yourself looking for new solutions to tackle everyday problems. In this article, we will show you how to take control of your work-from-home workflow and show you some essential PDF software you should know about.

Remote Work- Five Productivity Document Tools You Should Know About

PDF files can be notoriously difficult documents to work with. For people that use PDFs often, it’s time to consider getting software that offers a complete solution for editing and creating PDF documents. PDFelement is the ultimate PDF software, with the ability to create detailed and rich documents. You can also convert files from Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

1. PDFelement

When we work remotely, we find ourselves creating a lot of different types of documents. Whether it’s detailed analytics reports, newsletters, articles and more, PDFelement has robust tools that can make these documents easy to create. You can use their large selection of templates to get started with your new document. This software makes your workflow a little easier when you work remotely.

One of the primary features of PDFelement is the ability to create and distribute high-quality PDF forms. The rich editing environment makes putting together complex forms extremely easy. You can complete your forms with a signature input. You can also use the software to sign other PDFs with signature options. It all works very seamlessly and saves you time from struggling with stubborn PDF documents.

Having a complete software solution is a key part of how to work remotely. That’s why security features like censoring parts of your document are important to have, in addition to creating your files. If you have documents that contain sensitive information, you need to take your document security seriously. PDFelement has a powerful protect feature that keeps sensitive data from unintended access. You can block or censor specific sections of a document, and make them password protected. This is an essential aspect of your document security.

Converting documents no longer requires third-party software. The ability to convert Microsoft Office documents into PDFs, and vise versa, eliminates another common obstacle that pops up when working with PDF files. You can also convert images to a PDF file, which allows you to copy text from image files. Along with converting files, splitting and combining PDFs is an important feature they’ve included in their software.

Features

View

  • Open and read PDF file
  • Adjust view settings, set default page layout and zoom
  • Quickly search and replace text
  • Create and navigate between bookmarks
  • View metadata and document restrictions
  • Print any type of PDF file
  • View and navigate page thumbnails
  • Open and switch between multiple PDF files using tabs
  • Quick access to frequently opened PDF files with Recent Files list automatically
  • Navigate through pages with the arrow keys on the keyboard

Manage

  • Highlight, underline, or strikethrough text for easy PDF review and annotating
  • Markup and comment tools (text boxes, notes, shapes, typewriter, text underline, stamps, cross-out, highlight)
  • Drawing tools including pencil, lines, arrow, oval, rectangles, cloud, polygon
  • View, add, delete and manage comments directly in PDF files
  • Comment pane to sort annotations and comments by page, date, author and type
  • Create and manage library of existing and customized stamps
  • Add file attachments in PDFs.
  • Add annotations continuously with switch to hide preference toolbar.

Edit

  • Edit, move, cut, delete, copy, paste and insert new text and images
  • Edit, delete, cut, copy, paste, and insert new text and images in scanned (image) PDFs using OCR technology
  • Line and Paragraph Mode text editing
  • Change font attributes (type, size and style, alignment)
  • Add and move text and images with alignment guide
  • Apply, update or remove the background
  • Delete, add, move and rotate images
  • Support editing the objects in the form XObject
  • Manage pages in a PDF (insert, reorder, crop, extract, delete and rotate pages)

See the full list of features here.

Try it for Free

If you want to try PDFelement to see if it’s right for your workflow, you can grab a free trial before you buy it. There are Standard and Pro versions of the software, depending on what meets your needs. You can check out all the different features of the two versions here.

To help you get started, you can use their YouTube channel tutorials to learn how to complete all the different functions of PDFelement. They upload all of their tutorials for free, and there’s a massive selection of videos that will answer any questions you have about their software.

PDFelement 60% off sale

If you’re ready to take control of your PDF files, download PDFelement and get started today. PDFelement is available for Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. They have solutions for business, education, and personal use. Wondershare is currently having a huge sale on PDFelement, which the option of saving up to $60 on your purchase.

Download PDFelement

2. Adobe Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat is the most popular software for managing PDF files. It has been around since the beginning of PDFs because it is the original PDF creation tool. It has gone through a long evolution and become a really powerful tool for anyone who works with PDFs on a regular basis.

The complete multi-device PDF solution.

The main feature that will attract remote workers to Adobe Acrobat, is the powerful mobile app. You can download Adobe Acrobat to your phone or tablet, to have the best PDF editor on mobile.

The integration with Adobe cloud means you’ll be able to instantly access any document you make on your phone, while you’re working on your PC or mac.

Download Adobe Acrobat

3. Chrome Extension- Smallpdf

If you’re looking for an in-browser solution, this chrome extension is a great PDF tool. Smallpdf is a simple and powerful tool that lets you edit, merge, split, and compress PDF files. Open your PDFs right in your browser and take advantage of any of the tools to work with your PDF files.

Smallpdf – Edit, Compress and Convert PDF

Smallpdf can process numerous file types like PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, PPT, image files, scans and more. Using the Chrome extension, you’ll be able to perform the following types of document converts.

  • PDF to Word, Excel, PPT
  • Word, Excel, PPT to PDF
  • Convert images to and from PDF
  • Reduce the size of your PDF
  • Merge, Split and Extract PDF Pages
  • Edit PDF
  • Rotate and Delete PDF Pages
  • Sign and Send PDFs for Signature
  • Protect and Unlock PDF
Download Smallpdf

4. Google PDF Viewer

PDF Viewing is now available directly in Google Drive. For environments where this cannot be deployed, Google PDF Viewer offers the same capabilities in a standalone app. View, print, search and copy text from pdf documents while you’re on the go.

Google PDF Viewer

If you need a quick barebones way to view a PDF file on your phone or tablet, Google PDF Viewer is the right app to do this. It’s a super lightweight app that is designed to view and copy text from a PDF document. This will not have any features designed to edit, split, compress, or do any sort of advanced tasks with your documents. It’s simply a convenient free tool that you can use for your PDFs when you’re on mobile.

Download Google PDF Viewer

5. Adobe Scan

When you’re working from home, you want to keep your office supplies to a minimum. One thing you can replace is your scanner. We will often use a full-sized scanner to scan documents as PDFs. However, there is a much easier way of doing this by using your phone and an app called Adobe Scan.

Adobe Scan

Adobe Scan is a free document scanning app from Adobe, with integrated OCR technology to instantly recognize printed text and handwriting.

Use this mobile document scanner to turn anything — receipts, notes, documents, photos, business cards, whiteboards — into an Adobe PDF with content you can reuse from each PDF and photo scan.

Download Google PDF Viewer
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Hole-punch battery indicator app “Energy Ring” released for the Galaxy A51/71, S10 Lite, and Z Flip

The punch hole camera cutout was a unique take on Samsung’s design philosophy, and the company is embracing it quite well. This layout, formally known as Infinity-O display, was initially introduced by the Galaxy A8s, but the Galaxy S10 lineup was responsible for making it a household name. Despite having a rather polarizing review, modders have targeted these display holes for tinkering and come up with creative apps, such as Energy Ring, to turn the area around the camera hole into a battery indicator. The man behind the tweak, XDA Recognized Developer jagan2, has now added support for the Galaxy A51, Galaxy A71, Galaxy S10 Lite, and the Galaxy Z Flip.

XDA Forums: Galaxy A51 || Galaxy A71 || Galaxy S10 Lite || Galaxy Z Flip

Energy Ring was originally developed for the Galaxy S10‘s singular camera hole, but jagan2 eventually added support for the wider camera cutout on the Galaxy S10+. Since then, major Samsung flagships with punch hole camera(s), such as the Galaxy Note 10 and Galaxy S20 series, gained compatibility with this unique mod. According to the developer, the app consumes minuscule CPU horsepower and puts itself into deep sleep when the screen is turned off.

From changing colors based on battery level to defining the direction of depletion, there are a lot of customization options offered by the app, while a few extra features can be unlocked via in-app purchases. A special note for the owners of the Galaxy Z Flip: the current version of the app doesn’t support the cover screen LED due to the lack of official APIs.

galaxy_z_flip_energy_ring

The developer has decided to publish a dedicated version of the app targeting the aforementioned devices, which is linked below. The device-specific discussion threads are also listed separately.

Energy Ring for the Galaxy A51 — XDA Thread

Energy Ring for the Galaxy A71 — XDA Thread

Energy Ring for the Galaxy S10 Lite — XDA Thread

Energy Ring for the Galaxy Z Flip — XDA Thread

Energy Ring - A51, A71, S10 Lite, Z Flip edition! (Free+, Google Play) →

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Google is shutting down Neighbourly in May

Back in 2018, Google launched a new experimental app called Neighbourly which was designed to help users learn more about their neighborhood through local experts. The app was initially rolled out in Mumbai, India and was later extended to a few other cities across the country. For the unaware, the Neighbourly app allowed you to post questions about any particular neighborhood in a supported city and others familiar with the neighborhood could use it to answer your queries. While the concept was definitely quite unique and helpful, the app doesn’t seem to have garnered enough interest. As a result, Google will be shutting the app down in May this year, just two years after its launch.

According to a recent report from TNW, Google recently made the announcement in emails sent out to Neighbourly users which read, “We launched Neighbourly as a Beta app to connect you with your neighbors and make sharing local information more human and helpful. As a community, you’ve come together to celebrate local festivals, shared crucial information during floods, and answered over a million questions…But Neighbourly hasn’t grown as we had hoped. In these difficult times, we believe that we can help more people by focusing on other Google apps that are already serving millions of people everyday.”

Google further added that users interested in helping others out could now make use of the Google Maps Local Guides feature instead. The Neighbourly app will be shutting down on May 12th and users will be able to download their content until October 12th. It’s also worth noting that this isn’t the first service that Google has killed off this year. Earlier this year in January the company announced that it will be shutting down its App Maker in 2021 and it recently removed the location sharing from its popular messaging service Hangouts, which suggests that the service may also be shut down soon. Google has killed off a ton of apps and services in the recent past and you can check out all the apps/services that were recently discontinued by visiting the Google graveyard.


Source: Google

Via: TheNextWeb

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Google’s new WaveNetEQ machine learning model improves audio quality in Duo

Google has had a history of killing messaging apps unpleasantly in favor of newer communication apps that too are killed eventually. Google Duo has, so far, been an exception since it was launched alongside Allo, the now-defunct messaging service. Duo has continuously received Google’s attention and frequent addition of new features like 1080p support on 5G Samsung S20 phones, (upcoming) live captions, doodles, and up to 12 participants in a group call. Now, Google is applying machine learning to abate the major problem of jitters for a smoother and uninterrupted audio experience.

Video calling has become a vital way of official communication during the COVID-19 quarantine period and jittery audio can cost you or your company financially. Google acknowledges that 99% of the calls on Duo suffer from interruptions due to network delays. About a fifth of these calls suffers a 3% loss in audio while a tenth loses nearly 8% of the audio, much of which could be very significant information that you end up missing. This happens as packets of data are either delayed or lost in transmission and the absence of these packets results in glitches in the audio, rendering much of it incomprehensible.

Google’s new WaveNetEQ machine learning algorithm works on a technique called “packet loss concealment” (PLC). WaveNet EQ is a generative model based on DeepMind’s WaveRNN and creates chunks of audio to plug in gaps with realistic fillers. The AI model has been trained by feeding a large pool of speech-related data. Due to end-to-end encryption in Google Duo, the model runs on the receiver’s device. But Google claims that it is “fast enough to run on a phone, while still providing state-of-the-art audio quality.

WaveRRN relies on a text-to-speech model and besides being trained for “what to say,” it has also been trained for “how to say” things. It analyzes the input with a strong phonetic understanding to predict sounds in the immediate future. Besides filling up gaps, the model also produces surplus audio in the raw waveform to overlap the part which follows the jitter. This signal overlaps with the actual audio with a bit of cross-fading and results in a smoother transition.

Google Duo’s WaveNetEQ model has been trained in 48 languages fed by 100 individuals so that it can learn the general characteristics of human voice instead of just one language. The model is trained to mostly produce syllables and can fill up to 120ms long gaps.

The feature is already available on the Google Pixel 4 and is now rolling out to other Android devices.


Source: Google AI Blog

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